Where are the best sites to download fonts for free? Here you'll find quality type that won't cost a penny.

There are plenty of places to download typefaces on the web. But if your budget is tight, you can't always stretch to a pricey typeface. So where should you look for free fonts? In this article, we've rounded up all the best places to download fonts that won't cost you a penny.

It's easy to end up falling down the rabbit hole and spending hours trawling through poorly structured sites and low quality fonts. All of the sites listed here offer a good user experience and a selection of reliable fonts, so no matter what you're looking for, you should find something to suit your needs.

Besides the obvious places to download fonts for free (and don't forget to check our regularly updated list of the best free fonts), we've also unearthed some lesser known sources – including individual design portfolios and agency sites. So next time you want to download fonts, head here to discover a world of typographical inspiration.

With over 38,000 fonts available in TrueType and OpenType flavours, FontSpace is a useful go-to for free type. The fonts here are neatly sorted into plenty of categories to help you root out what you want – alongside the typical 'serif', 'script' (and so on) categories are fonts designed for a particular occasion – ideal if you're not quite sure what you're looking for.

FontSpace has over 2,500 designers supplying fonts, and they're clearly labelled so you can be sure whether a font is good for commercial use or should be consigned to personal projects only.

An online marketplace for community-generated design assets, Creative Market offers a selection of free goods each week – including one free font. The design changes each week and is only available for a limited time period. Because the fonts on offer here are typically paid-for, you know you're getting a good quality product. This is a brilliant way to build up a library of different font styles, and if you do want to buy something on Creative Market, you can often unlock more free fonts and other goodies with qualifying purchases.

The go-to place for designers to show off their work (don't believe us? Take a look at our list of graphic designers to follow), online portfolio platform Behance is a brilliant place to find free fonts. It's also had a recent redesign and is now even prettier to look at.

There's work of all types on here, so you'll need to add some filters to get to the free fonts, but once you've done that there are some great options to download. Whether you want a slab serif, script, tattoo or handwriting font, you're sure to find something that suits here.

Fontasy is an archive of over 1,100 fonts you can download for free. As well as a truly pun-tastic name, this resource offers a great range of styles and a pleasant browsing experience (the category list includes an example 'A' in each of the styles – a nice touch). Unless instructed otherwise, make sure you contact the designer if you want to use these fonts commercially.

FontStruct is a free font-building tool and community. Users create what the site calls 'FontStructions' using the 'FontStructor' editor (bear with us), and are encouraged to share them once they're finished, for others to download. This means there are a lot of fonts to search through, and more are added every day.

There's a range of high-quality TrueType fonts available here, ready for use on Windows and Mac. The site's easy to navigate and the best fonts are picked for the FontStruct gallery.

Misnomer alert! 1001 Free Fonts doesn't feature exactly 1001 free fonts; it's actually more in the region of 10,001. All of them are handily organised across 64 categories, along with the option to browse by designer.

Abstract Fonts has one of the cleaner interfaces in this arena, and it's very easy to navigate. There's a custom font preview option, the terms are outlined clearly, and it's updated regularly, with about 14,000 fonts for you to choose from.

Neogrey is the portfolio of Ivan Filipov. Working as a graphic and web designer, he's created some stunning fonts that he's very generously made available for free download. We particularly love his multi-coloured vector fonts.

Created by Lukas Bischoff, a designer based in Germany, Artill is a nice little website that's aimed purely at people wishing to download free fonts. It's minimalism at its best, and some great typography to be sampled. You need to share the font in order to download it.

Typedepot is a nifty little type-design studio website that offers a number of clearly labelled free fonts for visitors to download. There are also great commercial fonts to buy. The project began as a sideline for studio founders Alexander Nedelev and Veronika Slavova, before they realised their true passion for typography and took it on full-time.